Michele Bachmann Says Gays Are ‘Part of Satan,’ Should Be Joke

Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann this week tried to dodge questions about her husband’s dodgy ex-gay clinic — although she did say she’s “very proud of our business” — and now she’ll have to dodge questions about a 2004 speech at the National Education Leadership Conference where she let loose one of her most outrageous, offensive and downright despicable tirades about LGBT people.

Speaking about “sexual dysfunction” at the conference, Bachmann insisted that the “gay lifestyle” leads to “personal enslavement of individuals,” Queer Eye for the Straight Guy created a double standard for heterosexual and homosexual men — “Tell a gay man that he should change and that is considered homophobic blasphemy,” she said — and lamented the fact that television no longer uses gays as a punching bag; er, I mean, punch line.

“If you’ll recall television maybe 15, 20 years ago, if you’d see something about gays it would be an outlandish kind of an outfit, it would be a kind of tittering, making fun,” she said. “But that’s different now. Now gays are made to look good.”

The most horrific of Bachmann’s many anti-gay remarks, however, was her contention that same-sex love is in some way “satanic:”

We need to have profound compassion for the people who are dealing with the very real issue of sexual dysfunction in their life, and sexual identity disorders. This is a very real issue. It’s not funny, it’s sad. Any of you who have members of your family that are in the lifestyle-we have a member of our family that is. This is not funny. It’s a very sad life. It’s part of Satan, I think, to say this is gay. It’s anything but gay.

Ugh — “profound compassion?”

Please, Bachmann, spare LGBT people your condescending facsimile of compassion—there’s nothing more revolting than social conservatives extending an open hand, but hiding a fist behind their back, which is precisely what you and her ideological ilk do every day.

Social conservatives repeat their “hate the sin, love the sinner” mantra as if it means something, when in fact it’s a political ruse that uses religion to conceal a noxious worldview more in the line with the KKK than JHC.